"What is Time?"

There are two kinds of time: objective time, and subjective time. Objective time is defined by science and math. There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, about thirty days per month, and twelve months per year.  The clock represents objective time.

Objective time exists in a realm outside of our control. Nothing on this earth has any effect on objective time. There is no storm that can prevent the passing of time. There is no force that can increase the speed of time. No matter how badly we want the school year to pass so it can be summer again, no matter how much we want a night out with our friends to never end- there is nothing we can do to stop the ticking of the clock.

Subjective time is our perception of objective time. Subjective time is influenced by our feelings and our emotions. For example, I can be sitting in my Microeconomics class on Monday mornings. The class is only fifty minutes. But because it is Monday morning, I’m tired, and there are other things I would rather be doing besides learning about supply and demand, it feels like the class is three hours long. Objectively, the class is only fifty minutes. Subjectively, it feels like it has been three hours.

I distinctly remember a moment from the summer of 2002, between second and third grade. I was laying on my back on the couch in the family room of my home in Colorado, and my legs, for some reason, were sticking up in the air. I remember thinking, “Man. Summer is going by so slow.” Objectively, summer was two and a half months long. In my eight year old mind, subjectively, summer was a million years.

In my eighteen years and roughly seven months of life, I have come to notice an interesting fact about the passage of time. As we get older, the time goes by quicker. While the summer after second grade for me went by slower than frozen molasses, time has felt like it has picked up speed. Each year of high school went by progressively faster. This past summer went by in the blink of an eye. One minute I was on the stage at my high school graduation receiving my diploma and hugging my favorite history teacher- the next, I was on a plane flying to Richmond, listening to a playlist my two best friends made for me before I left home.

This is a question I often ponder when it is three a.m. and I can’t sleep- why is it that as we get older, time goes by faster? Is it because with age comes responsibility? Certainly now, I have more things to worry about than my eight year old self did. Maybe adults are more consumed with balancing work and family that time takes a back seat to other factors in life.

On the other hand, adults are more aware of time than children are. The summer of 2011, after my junior year of high school, I worked as an intern in the legal department of a business located in downtown Denver. The driving force behind every action in that legal department was a deadline. Contracts had to be drawn up by this date. Meetings with clients took place at this time and took this long depending how important the client was to the business. Everything was dictated by objective time. Therefore, adults have to be more attuned to time and have to have an awareness of the passing of time. Maybe it is this hyper-acuteness to time in addition to the added responsibility of life explains why time goes by faster as one grows up.

I never realized before how connected time and music are prior to taking this course. Music can be a manifestation of time, whether that is our reactions to and our attitudes towards objective time, or our perceptions of time- what I have defined as subjective time.

I am an only child, but I grew up with three of my cousins. In a sense, they are the siblings I never had. One of my cousins is my age, and one of his interests is time travel. He is constantly trying to think of new scientific ways that could make time travel possible.

I think that music is our time machine. Music has an extraordinary power of influencing our emotions, and the lyrics of a song can put into words what we cannot. When you listen to a song, it can take you back to a certain time in your life and you relive and experience all those same feelings you had when you first experienced that moment. For example, when I listen to “Hero/Heroine” by Boys Like Girls, I am fourteen years old again driving up the hill for my first day of high school. Or when I listen to “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri, I’m on the stage at high school graduation. Those songs bring with them all of the memories and emotions I felt when I was going to my first day of high school and receiving my high school diploma. In this way, music becomes our time machine. When we listen to Mozart, we are transported back to the 1700s. When we listen to music that is native to a culture, we’re taken to that place and hearing what is important to the people of that culture. Music is our time machine.

The Silver Swan automaton has been claimed

i am doing Tippoo’s (Tipu’s Tiger)

Before thinking about what role time has played and will play in my life, I had to establish exactly what the word time means to me. Simply put, if I were instructed to blurt out the first three words that come to mind when I hear the word time, I would most likely say: clock, class, and slow. That is, I had always thought of time as merely a fact. After some of the reading and thinking that we have done in this class, I’ve realized that time can and should be thought of as a controllable force as well as a fact. This concept has an ever-changing presence and role in our lives. To me, the easiest way to imagine time as a force is to picture a person’s life, split into several stages. First is infancy, followed by childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and finally old age.

It would be impossible to talk about my own infancy, so we must look upon a hypothetical life to begin. Time is simplest for infants. They wake up, eat, cry, laugh and go back to sleep. Therefore, it’s easy for us to say that other than moving through it, and therefore it simply being a fact of life, time doesn’t necessarily have another meaning for infants.

Moving on to childhood, I am able to use my own life to analyze the importance of time.  As a child, our lives are shaped and structured by time; time controlled by someone else. From the time I began going to school, having play dates and engaging in extracurricular activities, there has always been some kind of time-related pressure in my life. I was constantly being told where I had to be and what I had to do by a certain time. Whether it was waking up for school, doing my homework, or being in bed at my curfew, I was always subject to someone else’s concept of time. Especially in high school, if I were to miss first period of the school day or be late for my curfew on a weekend night, I would have gotten in serious trouble. This was all a result of my life being governed by my reliance on my parents’ force of time, and the way they required timeliness while raising me. All of this changed once I got to college.

Even though the next phase of my life, young adulthood, has just begun, I have already gotten a taste of what is to come. In the first three weeks of being at Richmond, my life has shifted from my time being managed externally, to being in a position where I have the ability to develop my own concept of time. I am incredibly happy to have the independence that comes along with the college experience, and the only way to showcase this is to re-tell my first day of classes. In short, I got back to my room after my last class, and purely out of instinct sat down at my desk and pulled out my books as if I were doing my homework. It didn’t hit me until my roommate asked me if I wanted to go play basketball and get some dinner: I didn’t HAVE to do my homework as soon as I got back. Looking back, I probably should have, but the fact still remains that instead of time controlling my life, I now have almost complete control over time. I can wake up whenever I want to (as long as I don’t have a class) and eat whenever I want to, among many others.

So far, I have seen an enormous changeover from my time being structured and supervised by others, to having almost complete control over my time when it comes to every day actions. The next change happens when one becomes an adult. Perhaps adulthood begins when one becomes responsible for structuring someone else’s time, however I would like to use parenting as my example. In the future, when, assuming I am a parent, I will inherit the responsibility of not only controlling my own time, but also supervising my kid’s time just like my parents did when I was growing up.

The last transition in a persons’ life regarding time would be the movement into the later years of life. Just before I left New York for Virginia, I talked to my grandfather, who is 94. My grandfather worked every day of his adult life until very recently. His concept of time has to change again as he enters old age in his mind and he is struggling with that because his concept of time has always been to utilize, maximize, and manage it as well as he could. He now has to redefine his concept of time as his days are less busy, his time is becoming less managed by his adult life and he is becoming less responsible for other people’s times. Our lives are shaped and governed by time, but the concept of time means different things and carries different burdens at different times of our lives. To me, it seems important to understand the role that time has in our lives, so that we don’t waste what is a finite and precious commodity.

Kienan Brownrigg

Uncertain Time

Time is an aspect of our lives that is so prevalent, yet indefinable. In our uncertain lives, we turn to the clock constantly for reassurance and find comfort in the fixed measurement of time and the regulation that is provides us with. We know that an hour is made up of 60 minutes, each day is made up 24 hours, and each year is made up of 365 days. The only unclear measurement is how many years our lives are made up with. This is a huge factor that differentiates the meaning of time in each individual’s life.  The first moment I truly stopped to evaluate the significance that time played in my life was 5 years ago on July 10^th of 2007.

It was Independence Day in the Bahamas and I had spent the day at the beach with a group of my friends. As the day went on and it hit seven o’clock, I decided to make my way home as I had a bit of a walk in front of me. I knew that if I took a shortcut, that I could make it home in half the time. So in spite of being skeptical of this routes seclusion, I decided I would save myself some time and take the quicker way regardless. I remember feeling a sense of uncertainty about my decision as I walked alone while the sun crept beneath the trees. It was too late to turn back, so despite my uneasiness, I proceeded. As I turned the corner, I noticed a group of men huddled up in the middle of the street. These men were by no means friends, and that was evident from the body language they were displaying. While I should have analyzed the situation further and been wiser about my judgment before approaching them, my naivety told me to just walk around them and continue down my path. I figured they were too consumed in their own situation to notice a helpless bystander. As I reached earshot, I was able to make out many threatening words and I immediately sensed the danger that accompanied the situation. My judgment kicked in and I knew I had made a mistake by not turning around.  Before my mind could even instruct my body to turn around and walk in the opposite direction, my eyes diverted to the gun that was being drawn from one mans pocket. I froze. My eyes, my body, my mind, my thoughts, and even time all seemed to be static in that very moment. I felt as though my entire world had halted and the only thing that remained in motion was the gun that continued to rise. I can imagine that in reality, the gun was briskly retrieved and shoved at the other mans chest, but my mind was no longer following realities momentum; everything was being drawn out in slow motion. Before my mind could process what my response to the situation should be, my body grasped control and took off in the opposite direction. I ran and ran as I heard several gunshots fire behind me. With each gunshot, it felt as though my heart would escape my chest. Time seemed to speed up to match the pace of my pounding heart and rapid pulse. I did not stop running and I did not look back; I continued running as fast as my feet would take me until I reached the safety of my house.

I remember hours later, still sitting on my bed being totally zoned out to the rest of the world. I felt as though I was in a trance and time was waiting for my approval to continue on at a normal pace. Hours felt like mere seconds as they passed by while I remained motionless in my fixed position. My head was spinning as I replayed what I had just witnessed over and over in my head. It was not until my rapid heart beat settled and it’s audible pounding become silent that I snapped out of my trance and focused my mind on the present. Reality was too harsh to comprehend and my mind and body drifted into a deep sleep.

The next day as I awoke, I entered the kitchen to a discussion between my parents over the newspaper headlines: “Young Man Shot Dead”. The article deliberated on the death of a 25 year old man who was shot twice in the chest on the very street that I was on, at the very time that I ran away. I can recall so vividly questioning the motives of time. How cruel and selfish it was for having no regard for human lives. How could it just continue on while this mans life seized to exist?

From that moment on, I would constantly appreciate and value each minute of each day. Every bit of time that is spent breathing is time that that unfortunate man will never experience. Our days on this earth are not guaranteed and are not limitless. This life is full of uncertainties, the biggest of all being the amount of time they we have left to experience, discover, and enjoy what life has to offer. To live with the expectations that time will make exceptions for us and that it will alter its course in our favor is a mistake. Time follows it’s own specific and steady path. Time lives on even when we do not.

I have chosen the automaton named “The Musician,” by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis, and Jean-Frédéric Leschot. It is an organ-playing female doll.

I’m going to do Zashiki karakuri

I’m going to present about the Canard Digerateur, or digesting duck, automaton.